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Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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Archive for the ‘LD #16 – Exploration – 2009’ Category

Search Treasur In The Cave My Entry For This MiniLD70 ,This Game Is Intended For All People Of Any Age , You Can Play This Game On Windows Or Linux And Also On Android.The Aim Of This Game Is To Discover The Treasure,Follow The Arrows Drawing On the wall To Direct You To The Aim…ENJOY!!! Thanks all.

My Page For Game : http://ludumdare.com/compo/minild-70/?action=preview&uid=111717

My Page For Game : http://ludumdare.com/compo/minild-70/?action=preview&uid=111717

I want to share something with you guys and get your feedback. Feel free to agree or disagree. But before I continue, I just want to say that I’ve participated in 8Ludum Dares so far, and they’re what I look forward to, I love them. Ok, now I’ll give my little spiel.

After making your game in the 48/72 Hour Time Limit, we get to check out and Rate other people’s games. When rating somebody’s game, we are allowed to give them x out of 5 stars in 8 different Categories. These Categories include: Innovation, Fun, Theme, Graphics, Audio, Humor, Mood, and most importantly, Overall. I’m going to talk more about the Overall category in a minute. Let me just talk about something else first:

As many of you may have noticed, probably for a while now, your results don’t seem very honest. The results you get may seem surprising, this could be in a bad way, or in a good way. You’re either pretty disappointed, or you’re really happy. This is because you didn’t get a ton of votes (i.e.: ~20-70 votes, which is what a lot of people end up getting). Think about it, there were about 2,800 other games out there. Do you think that with 50 votes out of the 2,800 entries you’ll get a really honest evaluation? You shouldn’t, because unfortunately, that’s not the case.

If 5 people rate your game and they all give you a 5 on Fun, the average would be a 5/5. If 10 people rate your game and 8 of them give you a 5 on Fun, and the other 2 give you a 4, the average would be a 4.8/5. Now the game with an average of 5/5 is ranked higher than the game with an average of 4.8/5. But the game with an average of 4.8/5 should be ranked higher because it had similar scores, and more people played it. Now I’m pretty sure that in the end the game’s categories aren’t ranked based on just the amount of stars given but still, I just wanted to give you something to think about. The rankings aren’t all that honest. I noticed that many of the Top Ranked games only had about ~30-70 votes. You’ll see that the games that got the most votes weren’t up there in the Top 100. But they did, however, have more real honest evaluations, while the others with ~30-70 votes were just lucky enough to get a handful of good ratings which therefore gave them higher rankings. The Top 100 are great games, no doubt, but are they the best out of the 2,800? We don’t really know for sure.

Ok, now I’m going to talk about this Overall category. The site says that your game is ranked overall based on your Overall category ratings. Do you think that we should be allowed to rate the Overall category? The Overall category should be based on the other categories rounded up. The site should give us the Overall Rating, not us. Here’s just one reason why: I’ve seen many people give a game great ratings, like 4-5 stars on every category, and then they would give the Overall category a 3. Umm… What? Shouldn’t you base the Overall category on the other categories? If you gave all the other categories 5 stars, then why would you give the Overall category 4 stars? The Average Overall Rating would be a 5, so give it a 5. But since people don’t always do that, let the Robots do the math and give us the Overall Rating, not the Humans.

I’m not entirely sure how Mike (Founder of Ludum Dare; Support him on Patreon!) can make the evaluations more honest because you can’t just have 2,800 people play all 2,800 games, that’s just ridiculous. But it’s just something to think about.

So after just over two years of development, a beta of my continued expansion of one of my LD entries from nearly three years ago was finally released for sale (buy now, get it cheaper and updates and a copy when it’s done) It’s been such a long time! Here’s a few screenshots from the game:

It’s been a long process, with a bunch of stuff detailed in my blog (http://magicbane.tumblr.com/) and I’ll be happy when the game is completed and I have all the experiences associated with developing and releasing my own game 😀

That, and the fact TWL has been in development since the first October Challenge, I guess third time really is the charm 😀

If you want to purchase the preview, you can get it via my Sellbox link!

Robot Wants Kitty was my entry for LD16 – Exploration, a simple Metroidvania game shrunk down to LD proportions. I made it in Flixel (Flash library), so just as an experiment, I thought I’d put it up on FGL and see if I could get any sponsors. I first spent about a week enhancing it a bit (the big upgrade was music by DrPetter!). Then the sponsor search exceeded my wildest expectations! I got a decent deal, and a lot of interest, and (foolishly) signed up to do 2 sequels with the same sponsor. With such a popular game, I could’ve done much better putting the sequels out for bidding individually. I just didn’t have that faith in my game! Remember kids, believe in yourself! And knowing is half the battle!

You can play the post-LD version on Kongregate among many other places (like Hamumu!). This all led inexorably to a pile more Flash games which made me a lot more money than I had been making in downloadables, so it was like a complete renaissance in the way I do business. Everything’s different now!

Then eventually during my heady flash-making days, Raptisoft approached me about porting Robot Wants Kitty to the iPhone. I was happy with that, but what I totally didn’t expect was that he was going to massively expand the game, as you see in the screenshot. I expected a straight port, but what we’ve got is obviously totally upgraded visually, has six levels instead of one, and has a built-in level editor, with user level sharing to come soon. It’s done awesome on iTunes in the week it’s been out, hitting New & Noteworthy in the Adventure category (not overall… yet), and so far garnering 21 five-star reviews, one 4-star, and three 1-star (people who couldn’t get it to run for whatever reason). Go pick it up, the best $0.99 you’ll spend today! I didn’t have much to do with creating it, other than making four of the levels and obviously the original concept. Raptisoft really made something great out of it.

Are there any file hoarders about? I’m looking for the download of the timelapse video I had available in this post (I foolishly removed it from my webspace some 6 months ago thinking I wouldn’t need it)

Now PoV is building this new database of timelapses, I’d love to be able to hand a nice high-rez version of it over

If you know what i’m talking about, and have the file – please either leave a comment (and a link), or contact me by email (david AT wizardslair DOT co DOT uk)

Thanks for reading, and I hope you can help,
David/Devlin @ The Wizard’s Lair.

Frame of my game is pretty much done. Basically you have a “gun” or whatever, which shoots colors. red, green and blue. There are enemies of the same colors, and you have to match the color to kill them. but wait, that’s the easy part. There are also magenta, cyan and yellow enemies, and you for instance have to shoot your light blue light through a green (or green through blue) to finish the cyan ones. In addition there are also orange, crimson, violet, cobalt, turquoise, lime and white enemies, and you’ll have to combine your beam with more enemies to get rid of them!

Red ray + Cyan enemy = White ray.

the next part of the game is making a simple AI chaser, and a level “director” along with something to protect in the middle of the map. I’m pretty happy with the color system, though, when you combine the “3rd” set (orange, violet etc) of colors you always get gray, which is the only loose end.

If things goes well I might even make an entertaining game, who knows I’m hoping to add slower but tougher (maybe they have two colors or something) enemies. but can’t say if there will be time for that.

I’m off to watch the outsides now though. been working 12 hours straight. weird part: I’m in a great mood! go ludum dare!

Edit:

Some air did me great. my plan for the rest of the day (putting it here so that i wont be able to lie to myself or procrastinate!):

eat + coffee

concept “art” (using the term loosely) and modeling. hopefully i will get a nice butt ugly city

Mike “Hamumu” Hommel‘s recent Ludum Dare game “Robot Wants Kitty” is rocking the charts at Kongregate. This post-compo version features music by DrPetter, and numerous enhancements to the original game.

My entry Asploreheim has been retired – I deleted the database tables and set it to give an error message on login. I have, however, preserved the scores at the scores page.

Blackduck says …Fun game, kind of laggy because of all the flags at the start. Gets quite repetitive eventually.

I’m glad you thought it was fun at first (and that I fixed the superlag bug). It does get repetitive, I admit, but you’ve gotta keep Exploring!

AtkinsSJ says …It seems like a good start, but never really feels ‘gamey’, unless I’ve missed something. And yeah, the paths around the middle make it really laggy – perhaps it would work better if hills only drew paths to nearby hills.

Yeah, it’s more of a tech demo than a true game. And I fixed the bug, thankfully.

C418 says …The game is now pretty much completely… uh… flagged up.
At first I thought the brown stuff was a weird kind of background, but after seeing this screenshots, I realized that it’s actually paths. As there are lot of flags now, I presume the game is a bit popular? 😀

Heh… “completely” was a side effect of the terrible lag thing and the center bias. If you managed to move out, it was pure empty. The idea is you have to just keep going. And it was popular at first, hence the “oh crud I released my game an hour ago and it’s already asploded”

TenjouUtena says …Every time someone needs to try a MMO, right? Obviously ambitious, but relatively unfinished. You need some sort of scrolling background to indicate that you should walk outside of the paths.

Ambitious and unfinished – that about sums it up. I’ll remember some better UI and polish if I ever revive Asploreheim.

philomory says …This is such an awesome idea, I wished it had actually worked for me.

The registration and login went ok, and I loaded the game world and heard the music and could walk around, but as soon as I walked onto an unclaimed hill, asploreheim.exe spiked my CPU and never went down. I had to force quit. When I tried to log in again afterwards, the game immediately crashed on login. Alas.

After some testing, the infinite loop on hill get seemed to be a side effect of the client not being able to handle all the server’s data. Oh well

SonnyBone says …This thing killed my internet connection, I think. I logged in and then 3 minutes later my router went down. lol

All joking aside… this is a neat idea, it just doesn’t work as well as you’d like.

Routers are silly that way :p
And that seems to be the overall consensus… cool but broken.

Covenant says …It crashes everytime I move the cursor on top of the button to register and/or login…

Clicking if the “too much data” thing occurs, but just moving the cursor over it? I haven’t a clue why that happens.

NiallM says …I found it very buggy. Most times it would crash as soon as I hit the login button. As others have said, it could use some kind of background to indicate that you’re moving, and it really needs some kind of goal beyond the basic ‘flag as many hills as you can’ goal. Maybe the ability to build your own castle once you’ve flagged enough hills?

Very buggy indeed. Castles are something to remember should I revive the project.

Wiering says …If I try to register, it says Server not found.

That… is a problem? Did you register from in-game or out? I know I completely forgot to implement the in-game button.

pythong says …nice idea with the multiplayer

Thanks.

Hempuli says …Interesting, though shortlived.

True, true indeed.

ippa says …I want to play without registering, create a test / test account! 😉 Or make use of facebook connect ..ppl hate another reg

I don’t have Facebook myself, but a test account would have been a good idea…

hazman says …Awesome idea.

Really buggy.

That’s it, essentially – clever but nowhere near complete.

sirGustav says …unable to register and cursor blinked too fast

Unable to register in-game I bet… button did nothing. Cursor blinking fast? I don’t know of “too fast” but I didn’t framerate-inhibit on the main screen.

In conclusion, Asploreheim was a great idea, but I did a horrible job at it. I forgot to implement in-game register, allowed the data to grow to unhandleable sizes, and generally it was hard to play. Mega-congrats to Moltanem however who got 81 hills! 😀

This has come up in the ‘Should Game Maker (etc. al.) count’ thread, but I thought I would split it off here, so that we can keep the conversations topical, and because I’m interested in what other people think. Also, I do agree with a few other people in that thread, that coming to an agreement about what LD is about will assist any rules or voting changes that may or may not take place.

What I’m going to write here is a lot my opinion, but is also collected and paraphrased from what I have heard other people said.

Several of the top winners of the competition used a game development tool such as Game Maker or Multimedia Fusion 2.

What brought these games over the top seemingly is a scope and size that is difficult to match with just frameworks and APIs.

Cat Planet I think has something like 100 levels. With a level designer built into Game Maker, the programmer can be developing levels within a few hours of the competition. I remember when building the level editor was part of the challenge. It is just really difficult to compete with a fully integrated set of tools that make it easy to create a game in a couple hours.

Apocalypse Adventure is absolutely enormous and doesn’t seem like a 48 hour game at all. To build something like this, you almost have to be building the world from the first moment of the competition, which evidently is possible in Multimedia Fusion 2.

I think it’s clear these all in one tools with sprite editors, animators, level designers, and event based drag and drop development environments, etc, give a big advantage to those who use them in these competitions.

I’m just wondering for fairness sake, and to continue to promote a diversity of languages, frameworks, and more interesting types of games than these tools usually allow being built, should we consider banning such all-in-one game development tools?

The list of which I would consider: Game Maker, Multimedia Fusion 2, Construct, Unity, and perhaps the UDK.

I’m not connected with Ludum Dare in any way other than that I enjoy entering the contests, but I just was wondering what everyone’s opinion on this was, as I’ve noticed a big difference in the scope and size of games developed with tools such as Game Maker and those that are not.

And I’m definitely not saying I’d like to go back to a “all from scratch” contest either, hehe.

The game I submitted to the contest (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-16/?action=preview&uid=28) wasn’t a game in the sense that you could like.. do anything. Objectives? nah. Plot? nah. What I did was essentially a tech demo- flash space exploration mmo. except more than a couple people turned my crappy vps into a flaming heap, but theoretically it was an mmo . Well, anyone that likes the idea of a cross between Elite and Eve Online, I’m continuing work on it and just finished a large rewrite of the backend:

I am currently aiming at getting something more playable in for TIGSource’s Assemblee contest by the 10th (all the art/music I’m using is generated earlier from their users). I just finished a full rewrite so that everything runs of Python/Django on Google AppEngine . Added bonus- game accounts can attach to google authentication

Currently the appengine framework is pretty much complete with datastore models for players,stars,planets,civilizations and npcs. I’m still tweaking the galaxy generation process but will be moving on to solar systems soon, along with multiplayer chat and pilot profiles, and some more ui options .

The game plan is to make it into kind of a multiplayer Elite – civilizations are generated along with the galaxies including homeworlds, npc ships and npc space stations you can interact with. You represent whatever civilization you choose and can later switch civs based on a reputation system. War against other civs and plunder, go freelance pirate, or do missions they give. There will be a limited resource you can use to claim new planets in the name of your civilization and either set up defenses or mining bases.
Each sector will be generated when a neighboring sector is first discovered.. ie a player enters sector 10,10 – the 3 neighboring sectors that haven’t been generated would then be created. There will be randomly placed wormholes or warp gates as well to connect to either other solar systems in the same sector or other sectors, to make exploring less linear.
Eventually I want to make planets explorable as well. They will be procedurally generated with a unique seed combined with the physical traits described by the ACRETE algorithm when generating them. I was looking at Away3D for making planet exploration a separate flash app

Congratulations to everyone who entered LD, there were some great and amusing entries